


Chicken Soup

by osprey_archer



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Bringing Food to Sick/Hurt/Traumatized Person, Gen, Hand Feeding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:47:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23684884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: After Jack Thompson is shot, Peggy and Daniel bring him soup in the hospital. Jack tries to believe that he doesn't want or deserve it.
Relationships: Peggy Carter & Daniel Sousa & Jack Thompson
Comments: 10
Kudos: 45
Collections: Flash In The Pan: A Food Flash Exchange





	Chicken Soup

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glorious_spoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/gifts).



The first time, Sousa and Carter visit Jack in his hospital room together. “We brought chicken broth,” says Sousa. 

“Thanks,” Jack rasps.

The single word tires him out. After he got shot, he was in surgery for – he can’t even remember how many hours the doctor said. He feels like he’ll be tired for the rest of his life. 

Carter and Sousa glance at each other, and that’s when Jack knows. He practically sees the spark jump through the air between them: they’ve finally stopped pussyfooting around and gotten together. 

Which is fine. He’s happy for them. Or he would be if he had the energy to feel anything. 

“I’ll feed you,” says Carter, in that brisk calm voice that makes ridiculous statements sound perfectly normal, and she sits carefully on the edge of his bed and unscrews the Thermos top and fills a spoon with golden broth. 

He opens his mouth almost automatically. The broth is hot and good. Her hand is so close to his face that he can feel its warmth. A little broth dribbles down his chin, and she wipes it off with a handkerchief, and for a moment her fingers touch his skin. 

He wants her to sit beside him like this forever. But he’s too tired for more than a few bites, and then his eyes start drifting closed, and when he manages to raise his eyelids again, she’s screwing the lid back onto the Thermos. “We’ll let you rest now,” Carter says, and Jack’s eyes drift shut again. He opens them with one final burst of effort, just in time to catch sight of Sousa’s hand brushing Carter’s waist as they leave the room. 

The image tangles in Jack’s dreams as he sleeps. 

***

The next time, Sousa comes alone, Thermos in hand. “Leave it on the tray,” Jack says. His voice sounds stronger today.

“I promised Peggy I’d make sure you ate some of it,” Sousa says. He sits on the edge of Jack’s bed and unscrews the Thermos lid. “It’s chicken noodle.”

“Carter make it?” Jack mumbles. 

“I did,” Sousa tells him. “My ma’s own recipe.”

Jack briefly envisions Sousa standing at the stove in a frilly pink apron, and it makes him uncomfortable. He turns his head away. It was bad enough when Carter fed him; Jack draws the line at letting Sousa wipe broth off his chin. 

“It’s good,” Sousa tells him. He fills the spoon, and when Jack won’t open his mouth, Sousa eats it himself. “Mmmm,” says Sousa, with the exaggerated intonation of a parent trying to get a child to eat, and despite everything Jack laughs weakly. 

Sousa smiles at him, his stupid brown puppy dog eyes going soft. Those eyes, Jack thinks: that’s what won Carter over. 

Jack can’t resist those eyes either. He lets Sousa slip the spoon in his mouth, after all, and slurps down the warm slippery noodles, and when the broth gets on his chin Sousa wipes it off so matter-of-factly that Jack almost doesn’t mind. 

Jack manages about half the Thermos that day before he gets drowsy. Sousa screws the Thermos cap back on, but lingers just a moment. “Jack,” he says. “You have any idea who might have shot you?” 

“Arena Club,” Jack manages, with a shrug, because that doesn’t narrow things down much, and it doesn’t feel like it matters much anyway. 

But then a memory hits Jack like a flashbulb. The shooter, he remembers, took Carter’s file.

“Sousa,” Jack says, and Sousa pauses in the doorway, turns back toward him, eager as a hound dog.

Jack tries to speak, but the words stick in his throat like chicken bones, until at last he blurts out something completely unrelated. “Congratulations,” Jack manages. “You and Carter.”

Sousa grins, so radiantly happy that he’s bashful. “Thanks.”

Jack sleeps fitfully that night. He dreams of Navy Crosses, Arena Club pins, enormous soup spoons that loom massive and menacing as he stumbles through a ruined city; and when he’s awake, he curses himself for chickening out. 

***

He’s relieved and miserable when Carter comes alone the next day. He’s glad he only has to tell one of them, only has to see the disappointed look on one face – but he’s sorry that face has to be Carter’s. 

“I can feed myself,” Jack tells her, and she laughs and ignores him, which is good because it’s not exactly true. 

Today she pours the soup out of the Thermos into a bowl. “Daniel said you finished half the soup yesterday,” she says. “Let’s see if you can eat it all today.”

That competitive streak is so characteristic that his throat closes up. Suddenly he’s afraid he won’t be able to speak – knows that if he doesn’t speak now, he may never tell anyone, and their undeserved sympathy will be like another Navy Cross hanging around his neck like an albatross. 

“Carter,” he croaks.

“Jack?” 

“The shooter…” he manages.

Instantly her bedside manner is gone. She’s all business, alert for a break in the case. “Yes?” 

“Your file,” Jack says, and is horrified to feel tears gathering in his eyes. “From the war. I was taking it back to New York with me…” 

He is appalled with himself, now, for not destroying it. In his current weakness it’s clear to him that the file was a convenient forgery, and he’s sure that she must hate him for hanging onto it as much as he hates himself. He can’t look at her.

“The shooter took it,” he finishes. 

He expects her to drown him in the chicken soup. Or at least to stand up and walk away, leave him and never come back. 

Instead she sits perfectly still for a long moment. Then she sighs. “Well,” she says. “When you are well, we shall have to get it back.” 

And then she fills the spoon with soup.

“Aren’t you angry?” Jack asks. He wants to sound dignified, businesslike, but it comes out small and pathetic. 

There is a pause. “You had better eat your soup,” Carter tells him. 

Jack opens his mouth like a little bird, though he flinches as the spoon approaches his lips. He wouldn’t blame her if she accidentally-on-purpose jabbed him in the tonsils with it. 

But she puts the spoon in his mouth just as gently as she did on that first day, and the soup is warm and good going down. 

He gets through the whole bowl, although he’s falling asleep by the end. His eyes drift shut again, and this time he doesn’t try to open them. He can still feel her presence. Her warmth, her weight on the mattress, her scent: clean soap and a whiff of gunpowder and the rich waxy fragrance of her lipstick. He breathes it in, his breath as low and steady as if he were already asleep. 

And then the mattress rises, and the warmth is gone, and although the scent lingers, he can tell she has gone. A brief disorienting panic descends on him, and he is sure that she will never come back, and neither will Sousa, and he will be all alone because he was too stupid to keep his mouth shut. 

But then the panic passes, and he is warm and sleepy and full of soup, and as he drifts off to sleep, he is glad, after all, that he told her.


End file.
